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42 of 43 found the following review helpful:
 Great read by the masterApr 17, 2008
By Ms. Ruth Walsh
"Angel,"
Its hard to beat Jack Reacher books when they are on form.Each generation, I suppose, has its favorite fictional Tough Guys. For my parents, it may have been Bogart and The Duke. For me, they've been Clint, Bruce, and Mel on the Big Screen, and the literary British spy Quiller. However, in the past couple of years, Jack Reacher has arrived on the killing fields. And he's perhaps tougher, certainly smarter, than any who've gone before.
A former Army major assigned to the Military Police, Jack has been aimlessly roaming the United States through several novels, and attracting big trouble in each one. In ECHO BURNING, he's hitchhiked into sunburnt West Texas where he's given a ride by Carmen Greer, who's cruising the highways on the lookout for a Tough Guy. Carmen lives with her young daughter, Ellie, on an arid ranch with her hateful brother-in-law and mother-in-law while her husband, Sloop, serves time in a federal pen for tax evasion. According to the story Carmen spins, her spouse had been viciously beating her for years. Since Sloop is due to be released in forty-eight hours, Carmen expects the beatings to begin anew, especially since she was the one that ratted on Sloop to the IRS. Will Reacher kill him for her? No? Well, will he at least teach her how to shoot the dainty pistol she's purchased? (In the meantime, what's with that team of three professional assassins circling the ranch unbeknownst to all? Jack may discover his hands full.)
All those other Tough Guys I mentioned are smart, but not so much that they don't sporadically get beaten up and kicked silly by the Bad Guys. But not Reacher - nobody gets the drop on him. When the reader sees a violent confrontation looming, he almost feels sorry for the villains for the World of Hurt in which they'll soon find themselves. By his own admission, Jack's a hard man who likes cockroaches better than the men (and women) he's sometimes forced to exterminate.
Reacher is endlessly fascinating. Having gone from one Army post to another, first as an Army brat and then on his own as an MP officer, he's never known a permanent home. So, now he chooses to live as a near-vagrant, shunning commitment to material things and the occasional interesting woman. He travels only with testosterone and a toothbrush, buying cheap clothes to wear and discard as he goes. He's educated, intelligent and gentlemanly, but excruciatingly asocial (as opposed to antisocial, which he's not) and heroically ignorant about how a "normal" life - wife, house, mortgage, kids, dog, 9 to 5, and Lexus - is lived. This is a man whom all you single ladies out there would love the chance to improve. (Don't cave, Jack! Be a role model for the rest of us New Age men pining to be free!)
Hey, all you other Tough Guys of lore and legend, move aside and make room for a Real Man.
This is a classic Reacher novel, fun and well written. I read it on holiday and thoroughly enjoyed it. I also read two of the Soft Target novels by Conrad Jones, great stories and shocking thrillers, a must for Reacher fans I couldnt put them. Try both they are great reading.
44 of 49 found the following review helpful:
 This is my least favoriteJul 07, 2002
By L. Quido
"quidrock"
book so far in Lee Child's "Jack Reacher" series. Jack's a loner, and it is fitting that he's back on the road again after trying unsuccessfully to settle down. He's in hot, dry, west Texas (and Child really makes you feel as though you are there - you're thirsty throughout the story!) where he's enlisted himself to help an abused (?) wife, Carmen Greer, and her daughter, Ellie. Greer's tale is fraught with lies, and, if I were Jack, I would have given up on her. She's not able to escape her husband, Sloop, and his secretive pack of friends that
have a past that leads to bloodshed. The pace bogs down from time to time, and it is difficult to root for Carmen. The ending is a lot more transparent than anything Child has given us previously. Worst of all, Child gets bogged down in his own descriptiveness, a problem encountered in his earlier works, where it was more forgiveable and did less to hurt his characterization and his pace. Not giving up on Jack, because he is the most refreshing hero of the past few years, but one more average work by Lee Child will send me scurrying for some new authors!
16 of 18 found the following review helpful:
 Echo Burning, Time WastingJun 02, 2006
By Ty Treadwell, author of The Devil Did Grin
Lee Child may be one of the most inconsistent writers in popular fiction. Some of his books are very good, some are readable but not outstanding, and some, like Echo Burning, are just plain awful.
The book starts out with one of the most tired, worn-out cliches in the mystery genre; a lovely wife in distress asks hero Jack Reacher to help her out by killing her abusive husband. Savvy readers are then thinking, "Aha! There must be more to the story than this! Some unusual twist or surprise sub-plot." The answer? Nope. There's not.
The book takes place in the Texas desert and if you chopped out every sentence describing how hot it is, the book would be about 20 pages long. Those remaining 20 pages would be descriptions of how long it takes to drive from one place to another out there in all that emptiness, which is what Reacher spends most of his time doing since the places he needs to go are so far apart.
This book took me forever to finish because I couldn't get through more than 5 pages in one sitting without falling asleep. Lee Child may have written some exciting, fast-paced books in his career, but this is definitely not one of them.
8 of 8 found the following review helpful:
 Finding trouble in TexasApr 03, 2008
By Fred Camfield
Jack Reacher travels light. His luggage is a toothbrush. He didn't know when he punched a man out that the man was an off-duty police officer, but he can easily slip out a windown. Thumbing a ride puts him in a car with a woman wanting to hire some muscle, and he ends up on an isolated ranch in Texas (dry, hot Texas). The woman is having trouble with an abusive husband, and he is due to be released from prison.
But there are plots within plots, people watching the ranch from a distance, and some hired killers have a contract. It takes a while for the plots to come together to determine who is doing what to whom. Some people are telling lies, and Reacher has to decide who to believe. There are a couple of twists.
Overall, I thought that this was about an average Jack Reacher novel. It did not hold my attention like some of the others, but it is an OK read. If you have not read novels in the series, this is a variation of the Clint Eastwood Man-with-no-name motion pictures, i.e., a man shows up in town, cleans up a bad situation, and slips away again. Reacher does not carry a gun, but will use one if pressed. He is a former major in the military police, and now he is a drifter who carries no ID and pays in cash.
11 of 12 found the following review helpful:
Reacher Doesn't Do TexasSep 13, 2008
By coalpuss
I read this awhile back and was surprised to see Amazon still pushing it. Lee Child is a good author, but his books have fallen out of favor with me in that I catagorize them as "formula books." They are all basically the same, in different locales etc. I feel the same about James Patterson, yet people seem to love his books.
Child started out so well, but now has fallen into a predictable pattern. His character will get into trouble within the first hour or less after he arrives in a town. I can appreciate he wants to travel light, but this business of rinsing out his clothes and after another wearing, buying new and tossing the old. I feel sure he must have a certain 'air' about him. As others have pointed out. he didn't research Texas very well at all and the errors are numerous and, frankly, bothersome.
Reacher seems to be basically an empty shell, wandering about and taking what comes along. A drifter. I can't care about him anymore and that is sad, because he was so effective when he intercepted the bad guy after the pretty lady coming out of the cleaning store ........... way back in the early novel. Remember how good that was? And how lame the current efforts are.
Perhaps a new character would inspire Mr. Child. He is a talented author.
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